Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘rules’

In the last three weeks, I gave you a sneak peek into teenagers’ minds. Many parents say to me, “If I only knew what’s happening in their mind…” and I think they have only forgotten what was on their mind when they were teens, or maybe they have forgotten the struggles their friends had during the toughest periods of their life – adolescence.

Here are the last 5 typical teenager thoughts and tips to prevent or eliminate them.

I prefer to be alone

“Thank God they are going away this weekend. I can have the house to myself. I can watch TV as much as I like, play the computer as much as I like and eat whatever I want. Freedom at last!”

What parents can do

When kids reach the teen years, they loves to be on their own sometimes and it is normal and healthy for them to be on their own. Even bringing a babysitter to stay with them (to take care of the other kids, of course) can give them that sense of freedom and it is not a sign of your good or bad parenting.

Having an evening when they can do something different is very attractive to teenagers and as a parent, you need to provide them with opportunities for such time. I remember myself at the age of 15 having the time of my life when my parents were away for the weekend. I did all the same things I did when they were there, but it felt better. On evenings when they went out, we played hide and seek in the dark and I still have wonderful memories of those special days.

This series is meant to help parents of teens and parents of kids who are turning into teens understand what teenagers think and what they go through as part of this tough period of their life. Each “twisted” thought is followed by something parents can do to help their teenagers and everyone else involved.

As in previous chapters, here are 5 things teens think and feel that scare them and make them act weird, and what you can do about them. I hope it will help you find alternative ways to address the issues and prevent them from keeping those thoughts any longer.

My parents are cruel and weak

“I think my parents are cruel. They hate me. They scream, shout and always tell me I’m wrong. They brought me into the world to torture me. They are weak. How can I trust them when I need help if they are so weak?”

What parents can do

When children are upset, they may think that you are behaving the way you do with the ultimate purpose of hurting them. Many parents mistake discipline for power when in fact, abusing your power and yelling, shouting or telling kids they are wrong are signs of weakness and may cause your children, especially teenagers, not to trust you to support them when they need help. This is because using pressure and force is all about you, not them.

In the past, people thought that teens’ behavior during the teenage years was directly connected to physical changes they start to experience at the age of 12, which makes them feel strange with their body changes and confuses them. Today, the approach is that adolescence is a more gradual process that starts with the first time children want to try doing things on their own, sometime as early as the age of 3.

If teenagers seem confused to you, it is mainly because they have reached a point in their life when they need to define who they are, what they think, what they like or hate, what their beliefs are and what they wants to be later on in life. These thoughts are tough. I know many adults who have not reached that self-definition yet, so this is not easy for a 12-year-old to do, although they are expected to have some clue about it.

Around the age of 10, beliefs that were part of children’s identity are shattered and they need to put the pieces together to survive emotionally. Kids with high emotional intelligence can do that, but most cannot, so they have to ask for help from those who unintentionally create the problem – their parents or their teachers.

This series will give you a sneak peek into teens’ confused brain and help you understand why it is so hard do be a teenager. I still remember my adolescence, I am raising my second teen, the third one is reaching puberty soon and I have worked with lots of teenagers in the last 25 years, so this list is quite reliable.

Last Sunday, Ronit ran a parenting workshop and I came in the afternoon to help her pack. When I arrived, she was still talking to the parents about rules and boundaries and mentioned the way she used “family rules” to avoid conflicts with the kids.

That reminded me of the time when I wanted to register for a software engineering course at the local university. The course I wanted was popular and all the places were taken, so I rang during my lunch break to ask to be put on the waiting list.

“I’m sorry, Sir, but you’ll have to come in person and fill out the waiting list form”, the administrator told me.

“Can you please just take my details and put me on the list?”

“I’m sorry, Sir, but it’s university policy”, she said.

Boy, was I pissed off at this. I was spewing for weeks afterwards. It may have even contributed to my later stomach ulcer. Or not.

Over the years that followed, more and more companies structured their operations in such a way that clients could not get their way. Not easily, anyway. When I rang Customer Service, I would bump into First Line staff who were basically trained parrots. The term “company policy” rang in my ears more and more often. It was infuriating.

But at some point, Ronit and I learned how to use the same trick to our advantage as parents. Oh, sweet revenge!

This is the message from Julia, describing her sleep problem with her daughter. When she sent me the question, it was easier for me to give her a call and answer her question, but I wanted to share it with you too, just in case you are having similar challenges.

Hi Ronit,

I have looked around your site to try and find some info on sleep problems with kids but had no luck. I know you are very busy, but thought I would ask just in case you can direct me to something that could help me?

My 8 1/2 yr old daughter cannot put herself to sleep, we have her in a single bed next to ours, and one of us has to go to bed at the same time as her, and usually we fall asleep, as it takes her a while to nod off. So as you can see, there is never any ”adult time” in our house. Things are getting rather desperate, as it creates a lot of problems as you can imagine. Hoping you might have time at some point to help me.

Thank you,

Julia.

For some reason, parenting and discipline go together. After all, in order for us to run a home properly, we must set some rules and make sure we follow them to everyone’s benefit, right?

Setting rules and following a discipline routine is not easy. It requires parents to have lots of discipline and self control. To my surprise, when people seek parenting programs to enhance their parenting skills, they look for disciplining tricks and techniques when in fact, what they need is not a one-size-fits-all way of parenting but exposure to many different philosophies, which they can adapt to their own kids, beliefs and circumstances.

I thought that the topic of discipline was probably something every parent would like to hear from people who have made parenting a high priority and somehow managed it well. Here are their answers.

Sometimes, when I give my business card to people, I get this odd question, “Are you always happy?”

It is a valid question and I think that people who ask it probably think this is the meaning of happiness, which makes me wonder why they do it to themselves. You see, some definitions of happiness are too tough, meaning it is hard to achieve them, and I would much rather have a definition of happiness that is easy to get.

Let me explain this by using food as an analogy. Who do you think is happier, someone who says “I’m only happy when I drink luxury wine from 1864, use spices from the jungles of the Amazon and cook my food for 22 hours, 16 minutes and 33 seconds precisely” or someone who says, “I’m happy when I eat”?

This week, I was at a conference and I had a talk about my book for teenagers with a woman named Jill. As often happens, our conversation turned into a “bitching session” about teenagers.

“Last night, I picked up my 15-year-old daughter from a party. I’m one of the rare parents who still come to pick their kids up. The rest takes a taxi”, she complained, “When I arrived, there were lots of police cars around”.

“Did anything bad happen?” I asked, worried.

“Oh, no, that’s usual. Every time she goes to a party, someone does silly things and the police arrive”.

My 20-year-old daughter and my 14-year-old son had never participated in a party where the police arrived, so I asked her, “What do you mean by ‘silly things’?”

Parenting kids is a challenge for most people. There are many things that make parenting such a challenge, but one of the big ones is that a couple of parents is made up of two different individuals, each with their own upbringing, values, beliefs and preferences.

If life was just smooth sailing, this would not be such a big problem, except life is bumpy sometimes and when tensions are high, things can get silly and weaken the parents’ position of authority.

Even when things are pretty quiet, the ever-so-sensitive kids can detect notes of disagreement between their parents and immediately try to use them to their advantage (little buggers). Parents who are too preoccupied to notice end up facing the “But Mom/Dad said” and looking pretty stupid being caught unprepared.

Rules were meant to bring us some confidence in life. People without rules live life as if they have a very short memory span, let’s say 10 minutes, so they cannot make sense of what has happened to them in the past and they cannot predict what might happen to them in the future. If you ask me, this is a scary place to be. Rules form a useful survival mechanism. We do not need to bang our heads against the wall over and over again in order to re-discover it hurts, right?

Rules are limiting if they do not put order in your life and do not give you certainty and stability. Successful people are those who adopt good rules of success and stick to them. If you are looking for success in your life, in any area that is interesting for you, remember that your successful rules of living are the blueprint of that success.